Today is October 20th 2015, the day after Canada has chosen to elect Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada a Majority government after a 9 year government held by the Harper Conservatives. What I wanted to do with this post was to effectively put a closer on all of the discussions, arguments, fights and online trolling I've been battling through during this election campaign, and give you my final thoughts on why what happened, happened. This is how I felt about this historic election, I've battled a lot with people on the internet getting some of this across, but I wanted to put it all in one place, before we move on from this to something else.
However I feel it would be dishonest of me, after such long and vocal voicing of my opinions to emit from you how I personally voted, and my biases, because we all have them. I voted NDP. Specifically because my riding had Megan Leslie, an amazingly effective politician and government critic who was very well liked, and because I thought it better to raise the corporate tax rate, rather than individual income tax. The liberal party was my second choice, and I will say it was a very close call and if I had been in a different riding I may have made a different call. I tell you this so you know where I stood in this election, and so you will not think me to be writing on behalf of those who do not share my opinions. I will also say that I did not vote blindly or impulsively and actually did read every party platform (conservatives included) and watched lengthy interviews with all the candidates (yes, even Stephen Harper, and yes even Elizabeth May) I know very well what everyone wanted to do with Canada, and I chose the option I thought best.
Majority governments are not easy to get from a political stand point, and to achieve one after a majority government of a different party on the opposite side of the political spectrum is rare. That's why I think it's important to look at this, because it says something about where we are as a country. From where I sat, intensely following the debates, social media, election coverage and public conversation, I think there are a couple major reasons why the Liberals were so widely voted into government this year. So, for better or worse, here's what I think went right and wrong for all the parties this election.
Voter Turn out:
68.9% of all eligible voters voted in this election, with some regions like Atlantic Canada having turnouts in the low seventy percents. That is the highest voter turn out since the early 90's. Whatever party you voted for, that high a voter turn out is excellent, it means people are actually engaged, and interested in their government. It also means that our democracy functions better because it is a more accurate representation of what a majority of Canadians want.
When the Conservative party was elected their majority in 2011 the voter turn out was 61%. A lot of people are saying that the vote went the way it did this time because young people actually showed up to vote this year, but, while young people generally do tend to skew more to the left on the political scale, this kind of turn out is too high to be just young voters (especially on the east coast where the population is mostly seniors). Clearly whatever the Liberals were saying it was connecting with people young and old far more than even when the Conservatives got their majority. I think it also speaks to just how much of Canada was unhappy with their current government, very unhappy. Now, obviously the conservatives have many supporters across the country, and did actually get enough seats to have a shot at a minority government if the vote was split more, but unfortunately for them the Liberals scooped up roughly 50-60% of the popular vote. In fact the conservatives had roughly the same share of the public vote as they did when they were elected the 2011 majority, (39% of public vote in 2011, Roughly 30% in 2015) which really speaks to how much a factor voter turn out is. The Cons basically didn't change their share of mind space in the public consciousnesses, they didn't get new voters over to their side, they didn't drive away that many of their former voters. The difference was that this time, the rest of the country also showed up to vote.
The other significant thing to notice is how the votes were distributed, because I think it paints a very clear picture of who Steven Harper's conservatives stood for and were most beneficial to while they were in government.
Issues like...
Infrastructure:
This is one of the biggest campaign promises to really strike a chord with a lot of Canadians outside the "blue zones." One of the biggest things that I've noticed since I moved out to Halifax from Southern Ontario was the state of the infrastructure everywhere east of Montreal. Roads are constantly filled with pot holes, faults and inadequate patch jobs, when they're paved at all, most bridges are visibly rusting or decaying, there are almost no buried power or phone lines and what transit there is remains underfunded. The provinces and municipalities out here just simply can't keep up with the rate of decay which makes it even harder to make improvements. Many of my facebook friends who were conservative supporters seemed to think that infrastructure was something we didn't need, or at least didn't need enough to spend the kind of money the liberals were promising on, and I can understand why they'd think that. When I lived there I got to enjoy excellent infrastructure, and pretty much assumed the kind of quality of roads, powerlines and bridges would be similar across the country. But I am here to tell my Ontario friends that is not the case, even in rural areas or the Muskokas the infrastructure is better than it is in most of the east coast and other areas of the country. This is not some idea for improving people's luxury and comfort, it's about keeping our roads and communities safer and working better. It's the kind of thing a federal government should be helping with. The promise for more infrastructure was the kind of thing the east coast and many, many other parts of Canada have been asking the federal government for the last decade, which went completely ignored by the Harper Conservatives.
It's strange that he would refuse so much to engage at all with East Coast issues, standard logic would dictate, that as a region full of mostly seniors who traditionally lean right or centre right,the Maritimes should have been somewhere he focused his energies. But instead he ignored us, barely visited (6 hour surprise stop over in Amherst) and then called down the ideas of the candidates who were trying to help this region. That's just simply a bad strategic move.
The Economy and Tax Reform:
For the last decade Stephen Harper's economic action plan has worked pretty well for some people, but pretty poorly for others. Unsurprisingly, the division between who his plan has helped and hurt also corresponds to the colour map above. Here's what he did, just so we're all on the same page here:
- He focused primarily on allowing international companies to extract our oil more easily, which created Jobs in the Prairies.
- Lowered the GST to 5%
- Cut taxes for the upper and very upper middle class, with the hope that they will create jobs
- Cut the large corporate tax rate to a ludicrously low 14% (less than most individual tax rates)
- Signed free trade agreements to make it cheaper to import/export goods
I know that's all in the past but their plan in this election was simply to not change anything at all. The Conservatives I'm sure had good intentions, the idea that if you help rich people and large corporations make more money, they'll spend more money and create jobs and stimulate the economy is one that a lot of people are in favor of. But rarely works well on a national level, usually causes more harm than benefits, and the benefits they do cause are incredibly lopsided. The plan to focus on oil and foreign manufacturing only worked in Alberta and parts of Ontario, and failed in the rest of the country. It made our economy incredibly lop sided and while, at the beginning the national job creation rate went up, that came at the expense of more rural and isolated communities in Canada who didn't have oil or manufacturing. In addition to that, the Tories repeatedly lied about their job creation record during the election campaign, insisting that it was fine and good, and not, as it turns out, the lowest out of any Prime Minister since WWI.
This was a bad plan, and Canadians saw that. Instead, latching onto the idea of raising taxes for the those Canadians who make 7 figure salaries or above to create revenue to make improvements. Something that has been shown to work. People often forget that taxes are actually good provided the tax revenue is spent on social programs that help all kinds of Canadians, but especially those bellow the poverty line. No one likes paying taxes, but Canadians were smart enough to realize that under a liberal government 99% of people won't be paying more taxes.
The Campaign of Fear:
This, this is where Harper went the most wrong, having policies people disagree with will get some people not to vote for you, but running a campaign like he did will apparently get your government completely thrown out in Canada. Stephen Harper tried to run the Canadian election like an Alabama GOP primary, and unsurprisingly, people asked him to leave.
There was a 78 day campaign this year, the longest one in Canadian history and it may have seemed even longer given that the Tories have been running American style attack adds since before the 2011 election started. Attack adds have been run by the cons out of election season for the majority of the time they were in office, seemingly every time the publicity surged for the NDP or the Liberals. They started saying that Justin Trudeau "just wasn't ready" before he even won the leadership of the liberal party. Canadians, clearly were pretty tired of hearing them. Now I'm not saying that attack adds are terrible and parties shouldn't use them, nor am I trying to say the the leftist parties didn't use negative advertising, because they most certainly did. What I am saying is that the sheer amount and, frankly, ridiculous advertising used by the Harper team did not benefit them. I also feel as though it galvanized the pro-left/pro-liberal supporters to speak their minds more than they convinced people not to vote for Justin Trudeau (remember the cons got almost the same percentage of the public vote as last time, when the liberal's soared). All the political attack adds levied for so long got people's attention, but once they had it, the Tories just couldn't figure out what to do with that.
Then there's the fact that nobody actually knew what the Conservatives plans actually were. Their entire platform was effectively them saying "See what the other parties are doing, we won't do those things" and then no alternative plan for what they would do instead. There platform was an expansion of an already existing home renovation tax credit and.... to.... keep doing.... the things they're doing? Do you know what those are? No? Well that's too bad because you'll never hear a conservative party member actually tell you anything they want to do or change. Look over there! Justin Trudeau's young and has hair!
Even Stephen Harper, whenever asked a question about what he wants to do for Canada, would just talk about how foolish it would be for Canadians to vote for Justin Trudeau. This interview with Peter Mansbridge that Harper gave halfway through the campaign is a prime example of what I'm talking about. Again, it's fine to attack your opponents, that's politics, but you have to have more to say than just pointing at the guy next to you and saying he's not as experienced as you. We've heard that song, tell us something new. Except he didn't. He ignored so many of the major issues that the other parties were talking about that it became apparent that there wasn't much that his government actually stood for rather than stood against.
Then, what parts of their message that did get through the haze of deflections and misdirection were ideas that clashed on a fundamental level with a vast majority of the country. First, the "home renovation tax credit" appealing to people who can afford putting large extensions onto their home, the credit would mean that you would pay less taxes on that. Okay, that's not a terrible idea, but when young families across the country are struggling more than ever to buy their first house, it's an inadequate response to the issues that most of the country is dealing with. Secondly, there was of course the Niqab/"barbaric cultural practice hotline" debacle, which was an obvious move by the cons to again direct attention away from their lack of actual platform by stoking the fire of the islamiphobia lying dormant in a vocal minority of Canadians. "Why was that an issue?" is the question that I heard asked by more people than any other question this election. Why? Because if we're talking about the Niqab, we're not talking about public broadcasting, bill-c51, the economy, or anyone of the dozens of important issues at play in this election.
Stephen Harper's conservatives campaigned to the exact same people they did last election, the same areas they did last election, with the same promises as the last election, with tactics that only made people more angry. And as one of the presenters during Global's election coverage last night said "When you P off enough people for long enough, it'll bite you in the ass." And it did.
The Cons ignored women's issues- Canadians elected more women to the house of commons then they had in the last 20 years.
The Cons actively fought against First Nations peoples- Canadians elected more First Nations MPs then we ever have in history.
They tried to make everyone talk about banning the Niqab, and to get everyone to give into islamiphobia- Canadians elected more Islamic MPs then we ever had before.
It's clear that they severely misunderstood what was important to Canadians in this election.
To put it quite plainly, the silent Majority who have been listening to everything that's been going on, all the hatred and dissension that the Conservatives stirred up during this campaign, and politely, but in no uncertain terms told them that it was not appreciated and that they should leave.
My (Biased) Conclusion:
To sum it up, Canadians decided to do something very rare and historically significant in this election. The sheer amount of people that turned out is astonishing, and what they decided on was equally astonishing. I'm not going to say Trudeau will be a great PM, we don't know if he'll be able to deliver on his promises, we never do about any politician, and I don't think Justin some uniquely pragmatic man. The next four years will have their share of challenges and curves for him and Canada as a whole.
Conservative supporters are talking about this as the worst possible outcome, they are fearful that then next four years will see Canada go down in a blaze of red flames. To them I say this; we're all worried about Canada's future, and the rest of us will tell you from experience, when the majority government has the opposite views you do, it's annoying.
But we just had four years of that.
Your turn.
#heavesteve
